APA project

[raggs]

Tom, while these may have been "refueling hoses" ie, diesel/gas/oil they could of carried water to smaller craft as well. Or may have been replacements
for lost /broken/worn hoses carried by the landing/refueling force. Redundancy was commonplace. As you referred to earlier, there wasnt an inch of deck space to go unused.

LST's supplied water and fuel to LCI, LCM, LCT, LCVP and the like, so they may not be for refueling purposes "in theater" during wartime. But given the dimensions I can see where the mind would think so. But specs are specs, but the "ingenuity" could be mind boggling.

Paul

[Fliger747]

Thanks for the input! Drawings refer to these (in different locations) as fueling hoses. Certainly these ships were mother hens, replenishing the invasion fleet with dried eggs, dried potatoes and powdered milk and other such staples. I do have photos of one of the APA's underway refueling a DE. The drawings show them laid out on the deck, these racks look like a better solution. By the 50's they appear to be gone. Of course by that time ships had some king posts cut down, vents removed and many lightening and simplifying alterations.

Regards: Tom

[Fliger747]

A "does anyone know (definitively with primary evidence)": LCM's, were the decks painted with deck blue/grey? Or some did, some didn't, or no?

Cheers: Tom

[Fliger747]

Ian asked about my sources. USS Lowndes has a site "Dobrinkman.net" which has links to some reasonably detailed plan views of the various decks and equipment. This was helpful, showing various hawser reels, and other equipment locations as well as being a fairly decent generic set of Haskell drawings.

Cheers: Tom

[Fliger747]

Number four hatch area, surrounded by boat cradles and oil hose racks.

Tom

[Fliger747]

Miscellaneous progress today, replaced a couple of O2 level cast resin W/T doors with printed ones (thinner) touched up a little paint here and there, made loads for a couple of jeep trailers, added some ancient (1970 Mfgr) numbers to the P Boats. Mostly shoveling the last snow remnants, blowing leaves and the usual Springtime chores. Squished my first Skeeter!

Tom

[Iceman 29]

Nice picture!

[BB62vet]

Tom,

Looking very professional with the b&w photo work - good choice!!! Makes it seem more WWII era-like. Model looks good too, btw!!!!

Hank

[Fliger747]

Thank you Pascal and Hank! I perhaps mentioned this before with regards to photography. For semi macro work (models etc) depth of field is often an issue, I am using here a 50 MB Canon 5DsR with a 100 mm Macro lens. To insure adequate sharpness across an adequate distance I us a technique called "photo stacking". A series of photos is taken with the focal point changing slightly with each photo. The series of photos is processed from raw if desired rather than using the JPEG. The files are loaded into Photoshop into a stack where they are first adjusted to be the same size (change the focus and the equivalent focal length and image size change) then blended to use the sharpest area of each image. This image is flattened from the layers, resulting in an image some 8000 pixels wide. To meet forum size requirements this is resized to about 1000 pixels and saved as a JPEG for posting.

Most of these photos are taken with a studio flash with a large diffuser to best illuminate shadow areas.

The images are usually converted to B&W in photoshop which allows maximum control.

Cheers: Tom

[Iceman 29]

Very nice technic result!

[Fliger747]

Yesterday progress, added a load and attached one of the LCM's. This one in color to show the load better. LCM is made in traditional manner from basswood.

Tom

[Fliger747]

A few more items today: Designed and printed a pair of paravanes as the one's I had built were nice enough, but a little too big. Painted and resting in their new home; Attached the 5" 38 to the fantail via sinking a round magnet into the deck in the training circle and glueing a trimmed piece of sheet metal to the bottom of the mount, such that it sucks and holds the mount into the training circle. Both rotates and is removable.

Cheers: Tom

[BB62vet]

Tom,

Just saw the last photo - Damn, that looks SO COOL!!! The artillery pieces, the dozer, the drums - man, this is quite over the top. Well done, again!!!!

Hank

[DrPR]

Tom,

Beautiful work! You have convinced me that if you can get this level of detail with 3D printing at 1:120 I can use it for my 1:96 model.

By the way, those large hoses would be used for ship-to-ship fuel transfers, either from a tanker to the APA or from the APA to other ships. They wouldn't be used for anything else. They were common in US Navy ships up to the early 1960s (we didn't have them in the '70s).

For the boats smaller fuel hoses would have been used, probably from on-deck reels. Water was probably transferred with fire hoses.

Phil

[Fliger747]

Phil:

The one area you would have a big advantage in the slightly larger scale would be in doing rails. In 1:120 or 1:144 usually they have to be slightly overscale due to printing limits and the strengths of materials. For a 2" rail you will be able to exceed comfortably the .3 mm which seems to be a boundary for pipe rails. For things such as the 5" twin mounts which I did in 1:196, I was able to have quite small grab irons etc print OK as they are short and well supported. I have been able to print eyelets which are far to tiny to get thread through!

I do have a photo of an APA underway refueling a DE. With the booms available and the experienced crews I expect they were good at it.

One disadvantage is the increased nitnoid detail possible to replicate. The old standard was that if something was larger than 2' it should be included on a model. Now it's more like 2", if you have the info.

Regards: Tom

[Fliger747]

The 5" 38 open mount for the fantail. The rails at the back (the largest ones) mike out at a scale 1.6" which is pretty close to correct, the small rail next to the checker's platform is smaller. A bit to fragile to mike in my opinion.

I beavered a recess in the fantail deck inside the training circle to place a small round magnet to suck in and hold the mount but allow it to rotate and be removable.

A small bit of sheet metal (a washer would have worked had I had one the right size) to attract the mount to the magnet.

Ah Pair of Vanes, or a pair of paravanes (is that four?).

[Ian Roberts]

Can only echo the above -- seeing the assembled product is really breathtaking.

How much of what you've built has been 3d modeled and then printed, vs built of styrene/wood/etc?

[Fliger747]

Ian:

I would say a very big proportion (> 75%) of everything is traditional construction, as I got into 3D only very late into this project. The hull is traditional frame and planking, masts are brass and turned aluminum, superstructure is basswood bulkheads, decks are plexiglass etc. I did go through and replace all the boats (except for the LCM's), weapons etc with printed items. So think pig with digital lipstick. I would use more printed items if I were doing this from scratch. The gun tubs are all Strathmore paper. I did replace a number of the resin cast W/T doors with printed items, I replaced all the handmade inclined ladders and many other small parts.

Having never done any CAD before, it was a bit of a learning curve!

Tom

[DrPR]

Tom,

The railings on the cruiser were 1.25" ID stanchions, 1" ID top rail and 0.75" ID center/lower rails (pipe dimensions were given as inside diameters, and wall thicknesses were about 1/8 inch). They were about 1.5", 1.25" and 1" OD. This would come out to 0.016", 0.013" and 0.010" at 1:96 scale. You say you are finding a 0.3 mm (0.012") limit. I could live with that for the lower rails by scaling the top rails to 0.014".

I have been trying to figure how to make the railings with brass wire (I have a good stock of the appropriate sizes). The problem is that the lower rails pass through the posts and I have been scratching my head trying to decide how I would drill 0.010" holes through the 0.016" stanchions! An alternative would be to create a jig and solder short pieces of 0.010" wire between the stanchions, but that seems like a lot of trouble to get the right amount of solder and a clean joint.

3D printing would be a lot easier! However I worry that the 3D printed railings would be very fragile.

****

Another problem will be eliminating details! The CAD model includes everything 3/16" and up (1:1 scale) on the real ship, including rivet heads, screws, nuts, and washers and miles of electrical cables. Things less than an inch diameter will be too small for 1:96 scale 3D printing.

Phil

[Fliger747]

Phil:

The .30 mm is 0.013". My comment about making brass wire railings is that EJ Foeth could probably do it. In 1:96 that works out to 1.13" scale inches Dia. The printing process will produce much smaller detail that .3 mm, the .3mm empirically is currently a strength of materials limit for unsupported sections of rail. The process will print much smaller grab irons, probably close to achieving your level of desired detail from your drawings. The Jerry cans I printed have the three rail hand grabs on the top. They are pretty tiny!

This is an evolving technology. Model RR folks generally accept that 1:48 is about the smallest scale that you can accurately replicate reality. 3D is probably the most accurate technique we have available for complex objects currently. CMC and other machining techniques certainly have applications for some components such a barrels etc but generally additive technologies are advantageous fro smaller items. I think in 3D you will find that small surface detail will replicate well in ways you would find difficult to otherwise achieve. For example rivets, bolt heads and whatnot.

Cheers: Tom